Encodable: Configurable Grammar for Visualization Components

TL;DR

Encodable introduces a configurable grammar framework for visualization components, enabling standardized API design and easier encoding specification parsing, thus improving component interoperability and development efficiency.

Contribution

It presents a novel configurable grammar approach for visualization components, decoupling grammar from rendering to facilitate API consistency and ease of use.

Findings

Provides a grammar design for visualization components

Enables component authors to define standardized APIs

Demonstrates implementation of components using Encodable

Abstract

There are so many libraries of visualization components nowadays with their APIs often different from one another. Could these components be more similar, both in terms of the APIs and common functionalities? For someone who is developing a new visualization component, how should the API look like? This work drew inspiration from visualization grammar, decoupled the grammar from its rendering engine and adapted it into a configurable grammar for individual components called Encodable. Encodable helps component authors define grammar for their components, and parse encoding specifications from users into utility functions for the implementation. This paper explains the grammar design and demonstrates how to build components with it.